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How to Guarantee Failure in Your Agile DevOps Transformation

Published By Mik Kersten
How to Guarantee Failure in Your Agile DevOps Transformation

Many organizations make the same mistakes when it comes to scaling Agile and DevOps and then attempt to rectify those mistakes by formulating a new strategy—only to miss the real reasons why the initiative failed.

As someone who helps companies through software delivery transformations, I’ve seen my share of ineffective behaviors. What I find most difficult to watch is organizations that make the same agile and DevOps scaling mistakes year after year.

Recently I made a visit to a Fortune 100 company where the last two VPs responsible for the transformation had been let go. In the meeting, I took some notes about what might be happening to the company’s Agile and DevOps initiatives to get them into such a bad state. I had a vivid image of a billion dollars wasted, and billions more that would be wasted if they didn’t learn from the past. This lead me to create a set of anti-patterns that you want to avoid at all costs.

You can read more about the anti-patterns – the mistakes made by large organizations during Agile DevOps transformations – in my article published in CMCrossroads: How to Guarantee Failure in Your Agile DevOps Transformation.

And if you have questions or would like to discuss my findings and recommendations, leave a comment and I would be happy to discuss.

Mik

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Written by Mik Kersten

Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open source code that are still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since then, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework - the Flow Framework™ - for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built, and is the author of Project To Product, a book that helps IT organizations survive and thrive in the Age of Software.